What is a .screenrecs file?

A .screenrecs file is a Screen Records project. It is not a video, which is why double-clicking one opens the editor instead of QuickTime, and why sending one to a colleague gets you a confused reply.

It is also not really a file. It is a folder that macOS displays as a single item, holding your raw recording plus a description of every edit you have made to it. The video you send to people is the MP4 you export out of it.

Here is what is inside, why it was built that way, and what to do when you want the plain video.

What the extension means

.screenrecs is the file extension Screen Records puts on its project packages. A package is a normal macOS concept: an ordinary folder that the system has been told to treat as one object, so Finder shows it with a single icon and opening it launches the owning app rather than showing you its contents. Your .app bundles work the same way.

Screen Records claims the extension in its Info.plist under the type identifier app.screenrecords.project, which is what makes projects open in the app on a double-click and carry their own document icon.

New recordings land in ~/Movies/ScreenRecords/ unless you point the save folder somewhere else, one package per recording, named after the project.

What is inside one

Right-click a project and choose Show Package Contents to see the real structure:

My demo.screenrecs/
├── manifest.json
├── media/
│   ├── screen.mov
│   ├── camera.mov
│   ├── microphone.m4a
│   └── voiceover-a1b2c3d4.m4a
├── backgrounds/
├── thumbnails/
├── transcripts/
└── exports/

media/ holds the raw capture, exactly as it came off the screen. The screen track is a .mov written by ScreenCaptureKit, with system audio muxed into it when you recorded with sound on. The camera is a second .mov, because it is a separate video that gets composited at export time rather than burned into the capture. Microphone narration is its own .m4a, and each voiceover you record in the editor adds another.

The screen track is the heavy one. If yours is larger than the length of the recording seems to justify, that has a short list of causes.

manifest.json is the project itself: a plain, pretty-printed JSON document holding the format version, when the recording was made, which display or window or region it came from, the timeline segments, your zoom markers, the background and aspect ratio settings, the voiceover positions and a record of every export. Nothing in it is encrypted or compressed. You can open it in any text editor and read your own edit history.

The rest are working folders. backgrounds/ keeps any custom background image you dropped in, thumbnails/ holds the timeline preview cache, transcripts/ holds Whisper output as JSON and text, and exports/ is where finished MP4 and audio-only files are written.

Why a folder and not one file

Because edits are non-destructive, and that has to be true on disk, not just in the UI.

When you cut a dead section out of a recording, Screen Records does not touch screen.mov. It writes a timeline segment into manifest.json saying that seconds 0 to 14 and seconds 31 to 96 of that asset are the parts that play. The original stays whole. A month later you can still recut the same recording from footage you thought you had deleted, because nothing was ever removed. Trimming a 2 GB capture costs a few hundred bytes of JSON instead of a second 2 GB file.

Keeping the capture and its instructions inside one package means the two cannot drift apart. Move the project to an external drive, rename it, drop it in a Dropbox folder: the media travels with the edit. Media paths in the manifest are stored relative to the package and validated against it on open, so a project that moved still knows where its own video is.

What to do with a project

Open it. Double-click, or use Open in the app. Screen Records also reopens the most recent valid project in your save folder after a crash, which is the reason recordings are written into the package while the capture is still running rather than assembled at the end.

Rename it. Rename the folder in Finder like any other item. The folder name is the project's identity: on open, the app adopts the name it finds on disk. That direction of trust matters when you have duplicated something.

Duplicate it. Finder's Duplicate gives you My demo copy.screenrecs, and it opens as a separate project under that name. Useful for cutting a 30-second version out of a long recording without losing the long one.

Back it up. It is a folder of standard files, so any tool that copies folders works. There is no database and no library index anywhere else on your Mac that needs to stay in sync with it.

Getting a normal video out

Export. The MP4 is the shareable artifact; the project is your working copy.

Exports are written into exports/ inside the package, so the video you just made is one right-click away from the project it came from, and you can drag it out to wherever it needs to go. Audio-only export produces an .m4a next to it. Send the MP4 to people, upload the MP4 to YouTube, and keep the .screenrecs for the day someone asks for a different cut.

Nobody else can open a .screenrecs project, because the format belongs to this app. But the media inside it is not exotic. If you ever need the raw capture without the app, open the package and take screen.mov out. It plays in QuickTime.

When you can delete one

Once the exported video is somewhere safe and you are sure you will not recut it.

Projects are the largest thing Screen Records puts on your disk, by a wide margin. A raw screen capture is far bigger than the compressed MP4 you export from it, and every project holds one forever. If your recordings folder is getting heavy, this is where to look, and it is usually the honest answer to where the disk went: video, not applications. A cheap habit: keep the last month of projects, keep every export, delete the older packages once their MP4 is published.

Deleting a project deletes only that folder. There is no leftover state elsewhere on the machine, and nothing in ~/Library grows because of it.

Send the MP4. Keep the package. Screen Records is free to use, no account needed, if you want to see what one looks like on your own disk.